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Fantasy Craft Review - This Isn't Just D&D in a Different Wrapper

When I first cracked open Fantasy Craft, I expected to find a rehash of Dungeons and Dragons in some form or another. I was able to keep up this illusion throughout the opening chapter by telling myself that while the classes were different and there were a few unusual races in the lineup, this was still basically the game that I was already familiar with. The further I read, the more I knew that what Crafty Games had put together was actually something very different than ye ole D&D.

Nestled within its four hundred pages, you will find everything that you need to play the game, including eleven playable races (with a boatload of splinter races), twelve base classes, six expert (prestige) classes, a gallery of NPCs, a bestiary, and all of the rules you will need to start playing the game. Since Fantasy Craft is built on top of the d20 Open Gaming License, the core engine of Fantasy Craft wonít be anything new to anyone who has ever played an OGL game. Where Fantasy Craft noticeably departs from the usual mold, though, is the way that it merges concepts that are seen more typically in modern genre games, such as a system for reputation, contacts and allies, looser management of character wealth, and an all around more cinematic approach.

Races of Fantasy Craft
Fantasy Craft has a respectable list of playable races, including ones typically only thought of as monsters, such as ogres, orcs and giants, along with some that are alien enough to provide an interesting roleplaying challenge to the hardened fantasy roleplayer, such as rootwalkers (treants), drakes (smaller, less powerful kin of the dragons), and unborn (living constructs such as golems). Each of the races have has its own unique list of advantages and disadvantages to playing them that goes beyond the simple plus two to this attribute, minus two to that. Even humans got a lot more attention with a generous list of "talents" to choose from, making them a lot more attractive to play than I have seen in other d20 based games.

In an era of RPGs where other systems encourage GMs to find a way to say "yes," to their players, banned actions seem a little harsh. This rule makes it difficult or impossible to play a character that goes against its racial stereotypes. For instance, ogres can never attempt to take a diplomatic approach and make influence checks, and dwarves can never learn to swim. I would have preferred to have seen a system that gave them a penalty to skill checks instead of banning the race from making an attempt outright. The player experience could also be improved by giving the player options to effectively buy off the penalties with feats.

[float=right][/float]Classes of Fantasy Craft
Core classes include the assassin, burglar, courtier, captain, explorer, keeper, lancer, mage, priest, sage, scout and soldier. Right away, it is evident that these arenít simply reprints of the d20 SRD classes. In fact, the only classes that strongly resemble a 3.5 SRD counterpart are the mage and burglar. Each class also features a "core ability." For instance, the assassinís core ability, "Heartseeker," improves the assassinís base attack bonus when he is attacking what is known as a special character -- basically, this is anything that actually has hit points and isnít part of the masses. These core abilities are only gained from your first level in your first class. This is an effective mechanic that allows Fantasy Craft to provide a nice boon in a class right from level one, without opening it to being abused by acquiring multiple "core abilities," via multi-classing.

Artwork
Other than the cover art, the rest of the book is completely illustrated in black and white. Nonetheless, the artwork is high quality and compelling with lots of little subtleties to hunt for. (Did you notice the dwarf with what looks like a dragon tooth for an axe head, or the goblin shooting him the "V" sign? How about the weeping cherub beneath the boot of the looming assasin?) The bestiary section, however, could have used more art and would have ideally had a visual representation for every monster listed.

The MasterCraft Engine
Fantasy Craft is the first game to feature Crafty Gameís new adaption on the d20 engine called MasterCraft. MasterCraft is described as a lighter, faster, and sleeker version of the Spycraft 2.0 mechanics. Having never looked over the Spycraft game in any detail, I canít really comment on how complicated Spycraft was. What I can say is that the system in Fantasy Craft brings a lot of great innovations to the gaming table by doing away with things that complicated or slowed down play in d20, and simplifying other things that were always confusing to players and GMs alike.

Armor Works Like It Should
Although this is a subtlety of the system that few might consider to be all that important, one of my gripes with d20 has long been the way the system handles armor. It doesnít make sense that wearing a heavy suit of armor somehow makes a character more difficult to hit. In Fantasy Craft, armor works more like I would expect by providing its wearer with resistance to certain types of damage instead of helping the character avoid damage outright. Instead, the game gives every class a new "defense" score right alongside of the typical saving throws that represents the characterís skill at avoiding physical attacks. Perfect!

[float=left][/float]Quicker Recovery and Less Dependence on Healers
Fantasy Craft features two hit point pools -- vitality and wounds. Vitality is explained to be a "mixture of endurance, luck and the will to fight." This is what your character gains every level as he becomes a more experienced combatant, whereas wounds represent actual physical damage. Although the system provides a couple of sneaky tricks that can bypass vitality and immediately do wound damage, most of the time the character is going to lose all of his vitality first before taking any real damage. This gives the game a more cinematic feel where the character narrowly avoids hit after hit until his defenses are worn down and he finally suffers a serious injury.

Vitality recovers very quickly -- pretty much one nightís rest will recover all vitality. The game also provides a means for players to heal themselves in and out of combat using action dice (the game's currency for cinematic play). All of this means less down time and less reliance on having a healer in the party.

Streamlined Skills
The skill list of Fantasy Craft is noticeably slimmed by combining like skills with each other. Each of the skills then has multiple uses. For example, the skill Acrobatics merges three skills found in D&D 3.5 into one for balancing checks, jump, and tumble. By combining them, it is much easier to have a more diverse selection of skills, especially given that Fantasy Craft is very generous with skill points to all classes. The game also completely does away with knowledge skills in favor of a single unified knowledge check.

Abundant Feats
Fantasy Craft features a long list of feats that players are sure to enjoy. My favorites among these are the weapon feats, which finally give players a reason to choose a weapon for something other than just whatever does the most damage, but these arenít just a bunch of combat feats, either. True to its theme of supporting everything from a very tactically-oriented game to a heavy roleplaying and social game, Fantasy Craft delivers an expansive array of feats for whatever type of character you are trying to build.

[float=right][/float]Modular NPC Design
Fantasy Craft features a wide array of prebuilt NPCs and monsters to challenge your party, and the game takes a unique approach by making all of the stat blocks modular. In other words, any monster youíll find in this book can be used at all levels of play. They simply plug in at whatever level your group is currently at and are ready to go. Youíll need to do a little math and cross-referencing of charts to determine the NPCís actual scores first, but fortunately, this process is easy and quick enough that you should be able to do it on the fly at the gaming table with only minimal downtime. This also comes with the huge advantage of being able to use modules more easily regardless of what level of play they were designed for.

While youíre perusing the NPC section, youíll also find a rather exceptional NPC Generator for stating out your own cast of NPCs and critters. This system goes way beyond the scant advice typically given in other games and provides a very precise way for building a creatureís attributes, special abilities, attacks, defenses, et cetera, and determining exactly what the experience reward for such a creature should be.

Campaign Qualities
Although this section is a mere five pages or so, it packs a lot of punch. Essentially, campaign qualities are a list of optional rules that the GM can apply to his game depending on the feel he wants for his game. For instance, the "Doomed Heroes" quality makes it far more likely that critical hits will be confirmed against the player characters, whereas the "Iron Heroes" quality makes it much more difficult for characters to die from massive damage. Campaign qualities are one of the things the authors have already mentioned that plan to expand on, so I expect weíll probably see a lot more of these as new products in the Fantasy Craft line are released.

"Your Dungeon, Your Dragon, Your Way"
This is the slogan emblazoned on the back of the book, and it is one of the key goals of Fantasy Craft. It is obvious throughout the book that the designers put a lot of time and thought into providing a framework that could support whatever type of game the game master imagines. With options like campaign qualities, a comprehensive NPC builder, and a book chock full of options for tactical and roleplaying heavy games alike, Fantasy Craft delivers on that promise.

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Cool review, Farcaster. I know nothing of the Mastercraft engine or Spycraft 2.0. I wonder how easy it would be to adapt some of the fantasy craft rules into another system like Pathfinder. I'd be curious to see to read through the armor rules, the hit point rules and possibly look at the feats and see how weapons are handled. Who knows maybe something useful can be gleamed from it.

"but hey, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong!" - Dennis Miller

I wonder how easy it would be to adapt some of the fantasy craft rules into another system like Pathfinder. I'd be curious to see to read through the armor rules, the hit point rules and possibly look at the feats and see how weapons are handled. Who knows maybe something useful can be gleamed from it.

You absolutely could use rules from Fantasy Craft in other d20 products you own, and there is a lot of good stuff to steal. Defense has a standard progression that you can imitate for non-Fantasy Craft classes. I made pages of notes on things I really liked that I didn't even mention here for sake of keeping the review from being too long. Action dice are a very cool mechanic for instance, that among other things, allows a player (or the GM) to activate critical hits or fumbles against their opponents. The more dice they spend, the more interesting the result. This is something that I think I will be using in any d20 game I run.

i never played the 2.0 version of spycraft, but i remember how much time it took me to put together a character in back in the ol' spycraft days. ^^ and being already familiar with d20, i look forward to an opportunity to try this out. thanks for the excellent review, farcaster!

I just found this book in Half-Price. I didn't buy it--I want to find some information on it first. Now I'm really interested. Funny that I feel D & D 4e has done some of this stuff as well, but I'd still like to check out the game. Maybe buy the book, get some rapid prototypefigures and a hex map, and see how the game plays on the table! Thanks for the info!
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Fantasy Craft and Spycraft

I have played both now and love both systems. The character creation adds a few elements that make every character cool and unique. Further, you can scale most monsters to any party level. which is nice. They handle down time seamlessly.
The magic system is very different but I think it is easier to use as is magic item creation. When I first saw it ti seemed limited but that was until I understood it fully. They handle Magic Items that grow with the character very nicely.
NPC and monster creation is very easy once you get the basics and you can play with variations to your heart's content.
The only down fall seems to be IMHO that the book lay out is not that great. Although it follows most books some things seem to be in the wrong place. But once you know where to find things this is forgotten.
If you have a chance to try either system, do so. I love my characters and I love to GM as well.